Readig:Theory of Impersonality

"T.S. Eliot’s impersonal conception of art and the fullest expression of his classicist attitude towards art and poetry are essentially given by him in his essay Tradition and the Individual Talent. 

Eliot explains his theory of impersonality by examining first, the relation of the poet to the past and secondly, the relation of the poem to its author. According to his view the past is never dead, it lives in the present. “No poet or no artist has his complete meaning alone. 

His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.” Above all, the artist or the poet has to work in the long established tradition of the literature to which he belongs. We cannot value the poet alone; we must set him for comparison and contrast among the dead poets of his language. 

In the next part of the theory he examines the relation of the poet to the poem. According to him, the poem has no relation to the poet. The difference between the mind of a mature poet and an immature one is that, a mature poet has more finely perfected medium. Eliot thinks that the poet and the poem are two separate things. The feeling or emotion or vision resulting from the poem is something different from feeling, emotion, and vision in the mind of the poet. The art emotion is different from personal emotion. In other words the poet should be passive and impersonal. 

To explain the theory, Eliot has brought the analogy of chemical reaction. When oxygen and sulphur-di-oxide are mixed in the presence of a filament of platinum, they form sulphurus acid. This combination takes place only when platinum is presence. Platinum is the catalyst that helps to process of chemical reaction, but it itself is apparently unaffected. The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum. Its presence may be necessary for partly or exclusively to operate for the combination of the experience in order to give birth to a piece of poetry. 

Eliot says that, the business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and in working them up in poetry, to express feelings which are not actual emotions at all. 

The emotion of art is impersonal. It has its life in the poem and not in the history of poets. So, honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry. The biography of the poet is not to be studied; the structure of the poem and its evocation powers are important.

The Impersonality of the artist (J. Joyce e T.S. Eliot) from the extract Tradition and Individual Talent What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality. There remains to define this process of depersonalization and its relation to the sense of tradition. It is in this depersonalization that art may be said to approach the condition of science. I shall, therefore, invite you to consider, as a suggestive analogy, the action which takes place when a bit of finely foliated platinum is introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide. in T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. 1 922. Impersonality of art Eliot showed with Joyce the view that the poet should be detached; indie his central purpose can be described as a search for "impersonality" as he himself called it in his essay Tradition and Individual Talent (1919). Detachment is the counterpoise to his deep sense of unreality, or equivocal reality, in personal emotions. In the essay he maintains the idea that an order constituted by all past works of art, the tradition, creates the total meaning of a modern work of art. The new work of art, however, modifies the tradition from which it derives its meaning."

The extract from the essay Tradition and the Individual Talent, published in 1920 by T.S. Eliot, deals with the importance of tradition and the significance of innovation.The central question the author tries to give an answer is what kind of relation there is between the past artists and the present ones. On this view Mr Eliot wonders what makes a new work of art, whatever art it is, innovative, but he focuses especially on poetry works. Mr Eliot does not agree with the idea that a work of art is appreciable just if it is unique. He believes that more I can glimpse past artists and tradition in a work more it would be considered innovative. A work of art is innovative when it is in all the ages. Paradoxically, a work to be new has to be old. The artistic production of old poets has to be considered in their period of full maturity, not in their period of adolescence. Mr Eliot talks about the concept of impersonality in art. He considers in particular modernistic art which is impersonal because it is an inclusive art: indeed it unifies the plurality of languages used in art. The concept of impersonality is connected to the innovation’s one. If an artist wants to be innovative he has to be able to express his personality combining it to those of other artists. However using tradition doesn’t mean handing down what antiques wrote. Being innovative doesn’t mean replicating what others did before. The thesis supported by Mr Eliot is that an innovative work of art is the one that shows tradition throughout the personal use of the artist. If an artist wants to appropriate of tradition he has to appropriate of the sense of history and time. This makes the poet to write not only with anything he has in his bones but with everything there was. Considering the historical sense, Mr. Eliot explains the relevance of seeing the writer’s position under the perspective of temporal and timeless which are concepts to understand what makes a writer traditional. Temporal means that the writer is the product of the age he lives into. Timeless identifies something that is true in all the ages: it is what makes a work classical. So an innovative work of art has to be both inside and outside of time. A writer is aware of his role and his work’s when he has understood what has been.                    

The text is and argumentative essay, so the poet state a thesis, and his goal is to convince the reader, with his argumentations. The question is, if I'm a talented poet, what make me an innovative artist? Eliot's thesis is that the most innovative is who combine the new with the past. We seem to be happy saying that a poet is different , isolated, and we think to have found an innovative poet. Eliot judge this approach not right. His thesis is that the best work of a poet is a production that shows the presence of the ancient poets. So the dead poets are still alive in the new productions. Therefore a poet is innovative as much his work is able to displays the most important productions of the history. At this point he goes in detail of his thesis. He don't considerers a poet innovative when he displays a use of language of an adolescent. When you are an adolescent you're influenced by emotions, while when you are mature you combine the use of the mind with emotions. But in Eliot's opinion, displaying tradition is not only a simple copy and paste action from the tradition to the new work of art. Eliot assert that not only the past influence the present, but also the present influence the past. So for example if a poet creates an innovative poem, this new poem influences also all the poems that belong to the tradition. In the end of the extract, Eliot states that a work of art can't be considered on its own, but it must be put in relation and reference with the other works of the past. In a similar way no poet has his complete meaning alone. We must put him in relation with the dead poets and artists. You can't value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.